the electure portal: an advanced archive for lecture recordings

INFORMATICS EDUCATION EUROPE
- THE ELECTURE PORTAL: AN ADVANCED ARCHIVE FOR
LECTURE RECORDINGS
Christoph Hermann
Institut für Informatik
Georges-Koehler Allee 51
79110 Freiburg
hermann@informatik.uni-freiburg.de
http://ad.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/
ABSTRACT
In this paper we introduce the eLectures portal
developed at our university and use it to (a) report
best-practices for the archival, organisation, and
distribution of recorded lectures (eLectures) as well
as for their usage in everyday teaching, and (b)
pinpoint open problems and describe current
research issues related to the production,
management, and usage of such lecture recordings.
Keywords
eLectures, Lecture Recording, Authoring on the Fly,
Indexing eLearning Material.
1. INTRODUCTION
In the mid 90s several educational institutions
started to record some of their courses. Meanwhile,
such lecture recordings or eLectures have become
an integral part of education at many universities
and are being used in addition to traditional ways of
teaching at more and more institutions [HMO06].
eLectures represent the respective contents with
multimedia documents (“virtual lectures”). The
recorded media contain the voice, the slides as well
as additional handwritings and annotations of the
lecturer; all of which are being replayed
synchronously. Hereby the interaction of the
lecturer with the slides during the presentation (e.g.
pointing at objects, underlining, or elaborating on a
formula) is also recorded. The replay of these
dynamic annotations normally increases the
understanding of the contents. Other streams that
can be recorded are the video of the lecturer or
captured screen recordings of used applications.
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© 2006 Informatics Education Europe Conference, Montpellier.
Wolfgang Hürst
Institut für Informatik
Georges-Koehler Allee 51
79110 Freiburg
huerst@informatik.uni-freiburg.de
http://ad.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/
Martina Welte
Institut für Informatik
Georges-Koehler Allee 51
79110 Freiburg
welte@informatik.uni-freiburg.de
http://ad.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/
Due to their size (the recorded data can get up to
several hundred megabytes) the recordings were
originally often distributed to the students using
CDROMs. Because of the forth going technological
development and the increasing bandwidths, today
delivery of such documents over the internet can be
seen as the de facto standard. However, we often
observe that people spend a lot of thought in how to
produce such eLectures in the best possible way
but lack a good strategy for archival and distribution.
Often, the respective files are just offered for
download via a course’s web page or a web site
that was set up separately. However, students
generally demand more service, such as better
archives and structure, full-text search, etc.
Similarly, content providers, i.e. the lecturers, ask
for ways to restrict the access to selected groups,
integrate the archives into existing learning
management systems, etc.
Because of this, we started developing the eLecture
portal 1 at our institute in 2003. In the following, we
first describe the portal and its usage. Then, we
illustrate some of its special features and present
some issues for current and future research.
2. THE ELECTURE PORTAL
Using the eLecture portal students have the ability
to access the provided lecture recordings anytime
and anywhere if the lecturer authorized access to
the materials. The recordings are available in
different file formats 2 in order to ensure optimal
delivery to the heterogeneous environment (e.g.
different bandwidths, various resolutions on the
students’ displays, etc.) The eLectures are
organised hierarchically following the course
structure and academic calendar. A user
management has been implemented which gives
lecturers and the other members of the chair the
1 http://electures.informatik.uni-freiburg.de
2 Available formats include Lecturnity with/without video,
RealMedia, Windows Media Video, and Flash
Animations.

ability to easily upload and organize the recordings
after a lecture has been held. An overview of the
most important best-practice issues related to the
distribution and organization of eLectures can be
found in [LMT04].
The eLecture Portal is used more and more by the
students. In 2003, there were only 2,700 visits
which increased rapidly the following years (2004:
26,192 visits; 2005: 45,990 visits) and with the
numbers of visits till June 2006 (26,678 visits) we
expect the usage of the portal to increase even
further in the near future. In addition, more and
more institutes are using the portal. Starting only
with a few courses from the Institute of Computer
Science in 2003, today almost all of their lectures
are available at the portal. Other departments, like
the Department of Microsystems Engineering and
the Psychology department have also shown
interest and started using the portal as well.
Detailed access evaluation together with information
about how students are actually using the data can
be found in [HMO06, ZH02, HLT06].
3. FEATURES AND CURRENT RESEARCH
Because of the increasing interest and growing
usage of the portal, we are continuously faced with
new challenges in the ongoing development and
maintenance of the software. In addition,
technology keeps changing and improving, thus
continuously providing us with new possibilities and
opportunities to improve the related services for
both lecturers as well as end users, i.e. the
students. In the following, we describe some of the
unique features that distinguish our approach from
comparable ones. In addition, we address some of
the current and future research issues related to
eLectures.
Providing a hierarchical structure and a search on
Meta data level is important to enable comfortable
access to the files. However, because of the
tremendous amount of data it is essential to also
allow for a detailed search within the actual
documents in order to offer a maximum usability
and usefulness. For this reason, we developed a
search engine which enables the users to perform a
full text search in the contents of the slides even
when they have been recorded with screen
grabbing and therefore are only available in a
bitmap format [WEB05]. This is done by matching
the screen grabbed recording with the original slides
and reconstructing the original object-based textual
information. The result of a search is a direct link to
the slides containing the search terms. Currently
we are developing an extension to this search
engine enabling the user to also search in the audio
stream, i.e. the recording of the lecturer’s voice. For
this, automatic speech recognition is used to create
a full text index of the respective speech signals.
Further information about the current status of the
search engine can be found in [HD06].
With the increasing popularity and performance of
mobile devices, new possibilities arise for the
delivery and usage of eLectures. As another
development, we therefore started to experiment
with the distribution of lecture recordings as
podcasts. Podcasts are currently enjoying an
increasing popularity – especially among students –
due to the pervasiveness of mobile media players
such as Apple’s iPods. Using RSS feeds, the
students automatically get the newest lecture
recordings when they are made available on the
portal. Automatically transferring them to a mobile
device opens new perspectives for additional
learning scenarios where students can access the
respective information “on-the-road” without the
need to carry around a heavy and bulky laptop. A
description of podcasting and eLectures including
an initial discussion of potential usage scenarios
can be found in [HW06].
Other past and current research issues related to
the archival, delivery, and usage of eLectures
include, for example, the integration of students’
annotations into the recordings [LL02] and the
evaluation of new ways for teaching and learning
using eLectures [TL05]. Apart from these
questions, there are a lot of other open research
problems and interesting perspectives for future
work. For example, the demand by other people
not directly affiliated to our university to access the
lectures, is constantly increasing. This necessitates
the development of additional, complex
authorisation and permission systems in order to
better manage open as well as restricted access to
some of the documents.
Another challenge we are facing is the integration of
the portal software in the IT-infrastructure of the
university, enabling all of our departments to use
the provided functionality and to ease the
administration and development of the portal by our
local software service team.
4. REFERENCES
[HD06] W. Hürst, N. Deutschmann: Searching in
recorded lectures. To appear in Proceedings of
E-Learn 2006, October 2006, AACE Press.
[HLT06] C. Hermann, T. Lauer and S. Trahasch:
Eine lernerzentrierte Evaluation des Einsatzes
von Vorlesungsaufzeichnungen zur Unterstützung
der Präsenzlehre. Tagungsband der 4.
e-Learning Fachtagung Informatik (DeLFI
2006), Sept. 2006.
[HW06] W. Hürst, W. Waizenegger: An overview of
different approaches for lecture casting.
Proceedings of IADIS International Conference
on Mobile Learning 2006, July 2006.

[HMO06] W. Hürst, R. Mueller, T. Ottmann: The
AOF method for automatic production of
educational content and RIA generation.
International Journal on Continuing Engineering
Education and Life-Long Learning (to appear
2006).
[LL02] J. Lienhard, T. Lauer: Multi-layer recording
as a new concept of combining lecture
recording and students handwritten notes. In
Proceedings of ACM Multimedia 2002, ACM
Press.
[LMT04] T. Lauer, R. Müller, S. Trahasch: Learning
with lecture recordings: key issues for end-
users. In Proceedings of ICALT 2004, IEEE
Press.
[TL05] S. Trahasch, Tobias Lauer: Scripted
anchored discussions of electures. In
Proceedings of E-Learn 2005. AACE Press
[WEB05] M. Welte, T. Eschbach, B. Becker:
Automated Text Extraction And Indexing Of
Video Presentation Recordings For Keyword
Search Via A Web Interface. In Proceedings of
E-Learn 2005, AACE Press.
[ZH02] B. Zupancic, H. Horz: Lecture recordings
and its use in a traditional university course.
ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, 34(3):24--28, Sep. 2002.